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In the past, many disgruntled job-seekers would shrug off failure by grumbling that success is about who you know, not about what you can do.

It's still about who you know -- but now it's also about how you know them, and whether you can parlay those connections on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media into an employment opportunity.

And it's no longer just job-seekers in the tech fields who have to plug in and link up or risk being left in the cold -- many employers are turning to social media to find employees.

"I hire all my staff through Twitter," says Lucia Mancuso, president of The Blog Studio in Toronto, which among other things designs social media strategies for its clients. "Generally when I'm looking for somebody, sometimes it's just a freelancer for a project or it's a full-time employee, I will send out a tweet to people asking if they know anybody looking that's either a good web developer or designer, whatever I'm looking for at the time."

Mancuso says she wants to hire people who already have a passion for her industry -- for one thing, it cuts down on training time.

"I also feel like if you have somebody who is searching you through Twitter, having conversations with your branded account, I would say this is somebody you need to hire because they're already a brand evangelist.

"You don't have to train them in how to drink the Kool-Aid, they're drinking it and coming to you already with it."

It's not a reach for companies with a web-based business to do their recruiting online too, but social media hiring doesn't stop there. When Future Shop, a Canadian electronics retail giant, launches its campaign Monday to hire 4,000 seasonal employees, it will be turning for the second year in a row to Facebook and Twitter to engage potential employees.

"We want to be where our customers are, or in this case where our prospective job applicants are," says Elliot Chun, communications manager for Future Shop based in Burnaby, who says the company sees "tremendous uptick" in the volume of responses when it uses social media, as opposed to the more traditional classified ads or online job boards, though it continues to use those as well.

Like Mancuso, Future Shop sees social media such as Twitter and Facebook as a way to appeal to people who are already familiar with the company's brand.

"One great benefit is the fact that it's instantaneous, so as soon as we tweet or post something on our Facebook page, it's up there live and ready for discussion. Another thing, it's very cost-effective," says Chun. "With social media it's just a matter of having a computer and having access to the Internet and away we go."

Candidate engagement is the upside of social media recruiting, says Melanie Fowler, a human resources professional and social recruiting expert at Syncapse, a Toronto company that develops social media software.

"The traditional recruiter will post a job order to various job boards and wait for an influx of resumes (we like to refer to this method as 'post and pray')," Fowler said in an email interview. "Candidates who apply to these job postings rarely (if ever) get any response and they are left feeling that they just sent their application into a black hole, never to be seen by anyone!" Paper resumes are redundant in Fowler's world -- if she gets one she'll email the applicant and ask for a "soft copy" for her electronic records.

Social recruiting, on the other hand, encourages a two-way relationship when done correctly -- which means the recruiter doesn't just use the corporate Twitter account for job postings, but to develop a conversation with followers, "using it to add value to those who are following him/her, i.e., information articles, etc.," says Fowler.

Just as social media has shifted the paradigm for recruiters, it's also opened the door to job-hunting 2.0, where the job-seeker is more proactive than even a decade ago, says Mark Evans, a digital marketing and social media strategist.

"People don't apply for a job cold anymore. Because of social media and because of connections that you have, a lot of people are recommended through their connections, or they get an 'in' because of somebody they know personally or through social media. Often people are using social media as a way to short-circuit the job hunting process by trying to find a way to connect with the job they want, or vice versa," says Evans.

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